Photo by Max Flatow.
Take an inside look at Caputo’s Bakery at Carroll Gardens Diary, where they speak to John and James Caputo (father and son owners, pictured above), and discuss the 106-year history of the Italian bakery on Court Street.
Established in 1904 by John’s father and grandfather, the bakery was originally opened for business on the southeast corner of Union and Hicks before it and adjacent buildings were demolished to make room for the construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. John’s father was the baker and he did everything by hand in an old-fashioned slow mixer. They sold three breads: plain, seeded, and scalita (a dry Sicilian bread that goes best with soups, I learned). Home deliveries were big then and so frequent trips were made by horse and wagon around the neighborhood, running up stoops with bread baskets. “Families ate a lot of bread – five to ten loaves a day!” John says.
The clientele was noticeably different as it was a working-class Italian-American neighborhood. “If you wanted to work behind the counter and be a salesgirl, you had to speak fluent Italian,” John recalls. “Our backhands? All Italian.” Those scalita loaves went fast. “Today we only sell a couple of scalitas, but we used to make hundreds of them. Meat was expensive and so the staple was bread. You filled up on bread. My father used to say ‘You can’t have a piece of meat without a piece of bread’,” John reminisces. James laughs and adds, “Our family still can’t eat without the bread.”
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